John Baldwin Gourley, the leader of pop-rock quartet Portugal. The Man, describes his band’s newest release as an album “we needed to make.”

It’s a statement that demonstrates the love Gourley and his bandmates have for the universally adored pop music of the ’60s and ’70s. The group harks back to the days when The Four Tops and the Beach Boys poured forth from car speakers incessantly, the volume knob cranked to the max, decibels testing the stereo’s distortion limits.

The Satanic Satanist, the band’s fourth album in as many years, breaks away from the group’s recent rock ‘n’ roll leanings. It’s a pop album that, in Gourley’s words, brings the listener back to those sing-a-longs we all had in the car with our families.

“All we wanted to do was make a record to span that generational gap between our parents and us,” he says.

Listen to “The Sun” from Portugal. The Man
[dewplayer:http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/underwire/2009/08/ptm_thesun.mp3]

The band should have no problems winning new fans with the material on Satanist, an album rich with dreamy, ambiguously optimistic tracks. Along with the poppy songs that pay tribute to yesteryear, you’ll hear an occasional serious ballad like Gourley’s “Do You,” a paean to independent spirit that proclaims, “I don’t run with sheep / The shepherd can’t hold me.”

Screeching guitar riffs accompany the group’s vocal harmonies, all led by Gourley’s high-pitched, soul-driven vocals executed with perfect cadence and timing (he was named Singer of the Year by music magazine Alternative Press in 2008).

Gourley, who does most of the writing for the group, explains the inspiration for the album comes from his childhood in Alaska. His parents moved from the Big Apple to middle-of-nowhere Wasilla (yes, that Wasilla), Alaska, when he was a kid, a decision that greatly influenced his songwriting.

“It felt like we were constantly escaping something and constantly running,” he says. “[We] just went out to the woods and lived in cabins, away from everything.”

The Satanic Satanist is an escape, too — from the bland, conventional pop made by the Britneys, the Mileys and the Jonas Brothers of the present whose success is predetermined by marketing execs perched atop Manhattan skyscrapers. Such “acts” are selling records, churning profits, hunting for the green number at the bottom of the profit line.

This is why, Gourley says, today’s pop songs don’t have the same power.

“It’s become a formula,” he says. “It’s a science. Everybody knows what words to write, everybody knows what chord goes to what and how it all works…. The idea of the structured pop song, to me, is doing something fearless. Just doing something bigger with less.”

Fearless, indeed: After winning critical accolades for their last album, Censored Colors, Portugal. The Man did not try to replicate its success. They did not make The Satanic Satanist to sell more records or make more money. The album was simply made out of necessity. It was for them, for their family, for Alaska.

It makes you think: Is this an album they needed to make? Or an album we need to hear?